Deeplinks Blog posts about WIPO

The first meeting of WIPO's Provisional Committee on Proposals Related to a Development Agenda (PCDA) has just ended, amidst a last-minute flurry of activity. The question on everyone's mind is where to from here? The answer is not so clear.

After four days of discussions about interesting proposals from Chile, the Africa Group, Colombia, the United States of America and the 15 countries in the Group of Friends of Development, late yesterday the Chair asked countries to "cluster" the 50-or-so proposals currently on the table under five headings, with the goal of shaping discussions at the next PCDA meeting on June 26-30. That meeting must produce recommendations on a Development Agenda for the WIPO General Assembly.

In the afternoon of Day 2 of the WIPO Provisional Committee on Proposals Related to a Development Agenda we finally got down to business: discussing Chile's thoughtful proposal on the Public Domain. Chile had actually put forward three suggestions, but it was the proposal for WIPO to undertake a study of the value of "a rich and accessible public domain" that drew comments from a slew of Member States, the Committee Chair and public interest non-governmental organizations. And rightly so. As Chile's proposal notes, the public domain is essential for ensuring access to knowledge, and provides the foundation for technological innovation.

The first meeting of the newly-created WIPO Provisional Committee for Proposals Related to a Development Agenda (PCDA) started yesterday, and runs until February 24. The PCDA is tasked with reviewing the 50 or so proposals put forward by WIPO member countries and coming up with concrete action proposals for the September 2006 General Assembly. No easy task indeed.

And then there's the politically-charged atmosphere. The meeting began almost three hours late after intense negotiations to elect a Chair that was acceptable to all countries. But when talks finally got underway in the afternoon, and countries presented their new proposals, the real issue at stake here - how to create intellectual property laws that protect human rights like access to knowledge and medicine - took center stage.

The UN's World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has just finished another round of deliberations on a new treaty. Although the draft treaty is nominally about Broadcasters' rights, most of the discussion focused on proposals to create new rights over Internet transmissions: the US's proposal to extend the treaty to "webcasting", and the European Union's pitch for "simulcasting" rights, covering retransmission of broadcasts and cablecasts over the Internet.

Today, the World Intellectual Property Organization, the UN's copyright/patent/trademark body, hosted a "Information Meeting on Educational Content and Copyright in the Digital Age" -- a meeting where representatives of libraries, Creative Commons, publishers, and science organizations vied to convince representatives from WIPO's 182 member national governments about the need for laws that balance the rights of creators and educational users of copyrighted works. Representatives from the governments of Chile and Canada gave inspirational presentations about the education-friendly copyright exception proposals currently being considered in their national legislatures.